River-Horse Pavilion
Columbia, Missouri

By Kit Salter

In March 1995, my wife Cathy and I went to wish Godspeed to Columbia, Missouri, resident William Lewis Trogdon as he was leaving for New York City to begin a 103-day nautical journey, which he would chronicle in the 1999 book, River-Horse: A Voyage Across America, under the pen name of William Least Heat-Moon.

Trogdon called his newly acquired boat Nikawa, which means “river-horse” in the Osage language. This 22-foot C-Dory with twin engines was nestled in a solid towing trailer. As the author prepared to ease both his boat and his hopes into motion, Cathy presented him with an ivory amulet of a sea otter. I handed him a Timex Expedition watch that had been my trusty travel companion. On that spring day, little did we know that the C-Dory being carefully pulled into traffic would later stand in a bold wooden pavilion just outside Columbia.

Today, as you drive north on Highway 63 just coming into Columbia from the direction of Jefferson City, the massive red metal roof of the Boone County History and Culture Center catches your eye. Then you see an open structure next to the parking lot. This is the River-Horse Pavilion, built in 2006 to celebrate Heat-Moon’s journey in Nikawa, the very boat we saw leave his home some years earlier.

Heat-Moon wrote on the final page of River-Horse that he had ridden Nikawa “5,288 watery miles from the Atlantic.” At the very end of that trip, to celebrate arrival at the Pacific, he reached for a pint of Atlantic water he had safeguarded for 103 days. He writes, “I raised the bottle  high, sunlight striking through the glass, salt waves rising to it as if thirsty, and I said, ‘We bring this gift from your sister sea — our voyage is done. Then I poured the stream into the Pacific and went back to the wheel of our river horse, and I turned her toward home.”

Some years after completing that adventure, Heat-Moon presented his already fabled C-Dory to the Boone County Historical Society.  The Society was proud to have such a fine bit of Missouriana from one of the state’s most productive and creative authors, but they had to ask, “How do we display it?”

The historical society wanted to make Nikawa available 24/7, yet protect it from the weather and potential pilfering. Local architect Nick Peckham (himself a marine engineer) worked with volunteers to design and build the wooden pavilion that stands adjacent to the Society’s main building.  This open structure provides easy viewing of the boat (behind plexiglass), a map of Nikawa’s route from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and photographs of the craft and the author. Nikawa, in fact, was now home, resting and lending its stature to all of Boone County.

But the backstory of this literary landscape possesses two more elements. In 1978, Heat-Moon was teaching at Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri, when it had to let him go because of declining enrollments. At the same time, he and his wife decided to divorce.

Heat-Moon reacted to that pair of events by undertaking a 13,000-mile solo trip in his 1975 Ford Econoline van. That 90-day journey (which began on Earth Day in 1978) resulted in the 1982 book, Blue Highways: A Journey into America, which spent 42 weeks on the NYT Best Seller List and has never been out of print. In the early pages of Blue Highways, Heat-Moon declares, “A man who couldn’t make things go right, could at least go. He could quit trying to get out of the way of life.”

With Nikawa’s historic voyage across the continent, William Least Heat-Moon showed again that he “could at least go,” and this time he took contemporary travel exploration to a new level of innovation. To complete the circle, I have my Timex back — but the amulet remains with the author.

Kit Salter lived in 22 different places by the end of high school. He graduated from Oberlin College and took his Masters and PhD at Berkeley. He is professor emeritus of geography at the University of Missouri and taught for UCLA, the University of Oregon, and National Geographic. He has been married to writer and geographer Cathy Lynn Salter for 38 years.

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Woodland Park
Lawrence, Kansas

By John Edgar Tidwell

In the weeks leading up to August 19, 1910, all the children in Lawrence, Kansas, were aglow with excitement and energy. To honor the birthday of Editor J. Leeford Brady, the Lawrence Daily Journal set about hosting a Children’s Day party at Woodland Park in East Lawrence. For young Langston Hughes and the other children of color, anticipation turned into anxiety and disappointment when the Daily Journal clarified the meaning of “invitees.” In response to the question about Black children attending, a front-page article confidently asserted: “The Journal knows the colored children have no desire to attend a social event of this kind and that they will not want to go. This is purely a social affair and of course everyone in town knows what that means.”

How could the Black children not want to go?! The Amusement Park would have special vaudeville and picture shows, bands would entertain, a Ferris wheel and a merry-go-round would provide free rides, and such favorites as lemonade and popcorn would be available too. Without knowing it, the Black children had run up against the prohibition made legal by the U.S. Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). The law of the land now defined “social” to mean “forced or unwanted relations.”  As protection against undesired interracial interaction, the court endorsed the concept of “separate but equal.”  Unfortunately, as Black children in Lawrence and everywhere learned, this legal interpretation granted society permission to practice racial separation without racial equality.

Hughes recreates this incident in Not without Laughter. He deftly enters into the Black children’s high expectations, which rise to a crescendo of excitement, only to be crushed when the admissions attendant refuses to accept the coupons that would admit them to the Ferris wheel, the shoot-the-shoots, and the merry-go-round as well as the entertainment and food. Later, he would capture this feeling of emotional confusion in his poem “Merry-Go-Round.” The speaker in the poem, a little Black girl who had moved from the South to the North, sought to ride the merry-go-round at a carnival. Not knowing if she would be allowed to mount a horse at all, she attempts to find the back of the ride. She laments: “Where is the Jim Crow section / On this merry-go-round / . . .Where is the horse / For a kid that’s black?”

Pernicious racism dogged young Langston Hughes throughout his formative years in Lawrence. To his credit, he never allowed bitterness and hatred to jade his vision of humankind. Instead of blaming all whites for preserving the racial status quo, he learned that “most people are generally good.” This quality, no doubt, inspired the city of Lawrence to begin embracing him as one of its own shining lights.

John Edgar Tidwell is professor emeritus of English at the University of Kansas. He has published six books, including Montage of a Dream: The Art and Life of Langston Hughes, which he co-edited with Cheryl Ragar. Tidwell is currently working with the Dream Documentary Collective and the Lawrence Arts Center to secure funding to make “I, Too, Sing America: Langston Hughes Unfurled,” a documentary film on Hughes’s life and art.

Danielle C. Head, Associate Professor of Photography at Washburn University in Topeka, KS. Head’s photographic work examines the physical remnants of history. Her series “Within and Without” traced the pathways of Lee Harvey Oswald and was selected for inclusion in the Midwest Photographer’s Project at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, IL. Her current work, “The Way Out of Heaven is Of Like Length and Distance” explores the mystique of “The Magic Circle,” a midwestern utopia conceived by economist Roger Babson in the 1940s. Her work can be found at www.daniellechead.com.

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4232 McPherson Avenue
St. Louis, Missouri

By Michaella A. Thornton

The Central West End neighborhood where Kate Chopin spent her final year boasts some of the loveliest homes in St. Louis, Missouri. Dormers and cornices and stained glass, lush gardens bedecked in hydrangeas and peonies, birdsong and wrought-iron fences.

4232 McPherson Avenue isn’t far from the domed, devout beauty of the Cathedral Basilica or the local coffee roaster who prides himself on not using computers to roast the beans.

I haunt Kate Chopin’s last earthly home on the weekends I don’t have my child, death all around us. I want to know how to continue writing through a pandemic. Here’s what I would love to ask Chopin as I sit on the front steps of this historic home: How did you do it?

How did you write two novels and numerous short stories and poems and support six children as a single, widowed mother? How did you remember your worth as a writer and human being when polite society shunned you after The Awakening was published in 1899?

Before your death at age 54, you suffered many fools. How did you put up with T.S. Eliot’s bore of a mother for two years in the Wednesday Club? You were right to roast the hell out of “club women” in your writing.

We didn’t deserve you, Kate.

But I’ve loved you since I taught “The Story of an Hour” to my community college students. Intuitively, readers understand the feeling of being trapped, the lure of freedom. We recognize “the joy that kills,” which is why I’m taking notes at this underwhelming two-story brick house.

Did you need smelling salts or brandy, as your friend Lewis B. Ely joked you might, when the local newspaper printed a bad review of The Awakening? How about when Willa Cather wondered out loud in a Pittsburgh newspaper how you could waste “so exquisite and sensitive … a style on so trite and sordid a theme”?

I mean, how dare she? Trite?

You studied Guy de Maupassant. You revolutionized flash fiction. Plot twists? Hello, “The Storm” and “Désirée’s Baby.” Realistic fiction? You debunked the saccharine stench of motherhood as martyrdom, and you wrote women’s sexuality as ripe, rich, and complicated as any man’s.

Only after your death would the literary world realize your brilliance. What a fucking shame and also so typical. Even now, there’s no plaque marking this house.

Did the critics make you doubt what you had to say? That kills me. Some say you wrote less because of the criticism. The Awakening was out of print two years after your death. It took more than 60 years for scholars and readers to rediscover your prose.

Many days, for me at least, it feels impossible to write in the margins of one’s life, especially as a single mother. To care for my child, myself, and my home, let alone my art, is hard. There are Zoom meetings and work in 10-minute bursts and snacks and walks and groceries to buy and a face mask to secure to my 3-year-old daughter’s nose and mouth.

And I am one of the lucky ones.

But also like Edna Pontellier, many days I’m drowning.

I cannot imagine doing what you did, Kate. You began a writing career at age 40. You navigated the straightjacket of women’s social conventions at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. You were the first to write unflinchingly about sexuality, divorce, and a woman’s desire to govern herself. As literary scholar Per Seyersted wrote in your biography in 1969: “She was the first woman writer in her country to accept passion as a legitimate subject for serious, outspoken fiction.”

As a former farmgirl who once dreamt of secret gardens and women who refused to remain silent, I sit on these cracked, crooked steps, and breathe. If homes hold onto a small piece of their former inhabitants, I feel respite here. I can finally catch my breath.

Kella’s prose can be read in Brevity, Creative Nonfiction, Complete Sentence, Creative Nonfiction, Midwestern Gothic, New South, The Southeast Review, and a few other places. When she’s not chasing her toddler daughter, she savors digging in the dirt, kayaking, and second acts. You can find her on Twitter at @kellathornton.

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599 Summit Avenue
St. Paul, Minnesota

By Ross K. Tangedal

In fall 2016, my wife, CJ, was four months pregnant, and we decided to visit the Minnesota State Fair at the insistence of my cousin Michael, a Minneapolis resident and state fair aficionado. After meandering through the massive beehive exhibit, CJ and I peeled away to take a quick walking tour of old St. Paul. I was excited to explore Summit Avenue, which is known for its Victorian rowhouses, including the birthplace of F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose work I’d been studying for the past five years.

599 Summit Avenue is not all that different from the houses around it, fitting into the line of its Victorian neighbors: two stories, with an arched entryway, a rounded bay window, and a stately turret topping the unit. One expects to be wowed when witnessing the domicile of genius, but this unimpressive house did little for my enthusiasm. We could not go inside, nor were there any definable features of the home to suggest anything but mundanity. The plaque out front says nothing about the home either, other than “F. Scott Fitzgerald House.” On Summit Avenue in the early twentieth century, people dreamt of their money aging. But now, more in line with Fitzgerald’s fears than his parents’ dreams, this home is a broken-down shell of Romanesque revival and mediocrity.

Rarely has there been a more complicated “favorite son” than Scott. He spent his childhood in Buffalo, Hackensack, and St. Paul, wanting so much to be more than he was, more than his disappointing father had become, more than a Midwestern nobody with glittering things in his heart. After completing his military service he drank himself into such depression that in 1919 he moved home to the last place he wanted to be, St. Paul, and lived in the house he least wanted to live in, 599 Summit Avenue, with the people he least wanted to live with, his parents. If he got his first book published, Zelda Sayre, a judge’s daughter, the rich girl that poor boys like him never marry, would marry him.

I know now why I felt that way about 599 Summit Avenue during fall 2016: we don’t appreciate transitions, not like we do beginnings or endings. The F. Scott Fitzgerald House in St. Paul is a transition cloaked in a beginning, a place he never cared to live in, and a place to which he never returned once he published This Side of Paradise. There was more for him, he thought, than a rowhouse rented with his mother’s money and populated by his father’s letdowns. He was always moving away from St. Paul and the Midwest, even when he wrote about them. Fitzgerald’s Midwest was behind him. His future was glittering things and people. Like his character Dexter Green in the short story “Winter Dreams,” Fitzgerald was all potential.

As for CJ and I, our trip to St. Paul that summer was a beginning too, with a pregnancy and a new job leading toward our unknowable future. Like Fitzgerald, I had a hard time appreciating the transition. Then my daughter Adeline Rose arrived just five months later, glittering with the newness of life.

Ross K. Tangedal is assistant professor of English and director of the Cornerstone Press at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point. He specializes in American print culture and publishing studies, textual editing, and book history, with emphasis in Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Midwestern literature. His first book, The Preface: American Authorship in the Twentieth Century, will be released in 2021 by Palgrave Macmillan.

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Greene County Courthouse
Xenia, Ohio

By Jacob A. Bruggeman

I first visited Xenia, Ohio, a small city in the state’s southwestern corner, on a hot May afternoon in 2018. Headed north from Cincinnati on Interstate 71, smoke started rising out from under the hood of my 1999 Toyota Corolla. I pulled onto the highway’s shoulder, popped the hood, and prepared to do battle with the Toyota’s notoriously oil-burning engine. Equipped only with a container of 5W-30 motor oil, I realized that my modest mechanical know-how was insufficient, and I called good ol’ AAA.

While waiting for the Triple-A guy, I saw a roadside sign pointing Xenia’s way. Soon enough, I was riding shotgun in the tow truck as we rolled through the city and passed the Greene County Courthouse at 45 North Detroit Street. Built of Bedford stone in 1901–1902, the Romanesque courthouse’s soaring square clock tower has been a community touchstone in Xenia for more than half of its history.

Born in Cincinnati and raised in Xenia, novelist Helen Hooven Santmyer (1895–1986) captures the courthouse’s centrality in the opening passage of her memoir, Ohio Town: A Portrait of Xenia (1962). Santmyer acknowledges that, because so many similar structures are scattered “all along middle western roads,” Xenia’s visitors “must hardly give the courthouse a conscious thought.” For the resident, however, the courthouse is distinct, familiar, and necessary:

Along with the state of the weather and the time of day, there has always been in his mind a background consciousness of the tower with its four-faced clock, the goose-girl drinking fountain on the Main Street curb, the spread of lawn, and the trees in the square whose crests are stirred by winds higher than the roof.

Ohio Town proceeds with similarly rich descriptions of community life in chapters titled “Streets and Houses,” “Church,” “School,” “The Railroad,” and “There Were Fences,” all focused on the rhythms of life in Xenia.

Founded in 1803, the same year Ohio was admitted to the Union, Xenia was an early testing ground for tribal relations and removal. In fact, in the early 1800s, the Shawnee Indians called Old Chillicothe, a small village just north of Xenia, their home; Tecumseh, the famous and then-feared chief who organized a confederacy to stop settler colonialism, was born there. As time passed, the character of his ancestral lands changed as ploughs broke, railroads cut, and Main Streets sprung up upon them.

Ohio communities like Xenia flourished as natives like Tecumseh were slain or forced further inland, and settlers began the long, frequently violent transformation of the region into what Xenia-born historian Arthur Schlesinger Sr. described as the Midwest’s “valley of democracy.”

From a young age, Santmyer cherished the products of that transformation: southwestern Ohio’s communities and traditions. Enthused by Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, she dedicated herself to recording them in writing. After retiring as a librarian in Dayton in 1959, Santmyer published her two major critical and popular successes: Ohio Town and …And the Ladies of the Club (1982), a nearly 1200-page epic telling the story of generations of communal life in rural Ohio. Indeed, Santmyer’s writing is a testament to the social dynamism of what might outwardly be described as a dull Midwestern town.

For Santmyer, the courthouse is a literary conduit for those intricacies: its enduring image “recall[s] the Saturday-night excitement of the past,” when its “curb […] was the center of noise and light and crowded movement.” For Xenia’s former residents, the courthouse remains the “the first vision to flash upon the inward eye,” expanding into memories of “the courthouse as it was on quiet afternoons, when nothing moved in the length and breadth of the sun-blazing streets, and only a few persons were to be seen in open shop doors or on the benches under the elms.”

To read Santmyer today is to revel in her satisfyingly efficient and life-affirming descriptions of midcentury Ohio life, whereby readers may access something of the joy and reverie once held common in its streets. At the same time, those celebrations also obscure the decidedly undemocratic origins of Ohio’s settler communities: despite their virtues as sung by Santmyer and Schlesinger, towns like Xenia were built on stolen land. The extent to which Xenians — and, indeed, Ohioans — comprehend this erasure is unclear, but ignorance then is no justification for indifference now. To read Santmyer today, then, is to dwell in the tension between her wonderful rendering of Xenia’s social and civic life with the true weight of its cost.

Jacob Bruggeman is a PhD student in American History at Johns Hopkins University and an editor of the Cleveland Review of Books. You can follow him on Twitter @jacob_bruggeman.

Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons user Dph414.

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